


Waxing or Waning

by loveundone



Category: Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, in which cloud gets a glimpse of tifa through her anger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:33:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24160615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveundone/pseuds/loveundone
Summary: When he realizes she’s not in a tight spot, but instead a well, one that deepens every time she pulls back, Cloud understands his own shortcomings. The realization he has not understood as well as he thought he did. That her good spirits hadn’t meant a high morale, rather, Tifa distrusted being vulnerable. Around him, and around anyone.That her red eyes have been nothing if not a warning sign flickering.
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife
Comments: 3
Kudos: 82





	Waxing or Waning

The kind of headache Tifa gives him is special.

It’s one that doesn’t hurt, not really. One that is more flower bud than stab of static. As if her life, her survival, hides something from him, if not  _ of _ him. But, Cloud has never asked the right questions. Can hardly thread a smooth conversation without being met with exasperation or a frown — and ever since scaring her four days ago or so, he decided frowns aren’t the look he wants to be met with from her face. Leaning on his room’s sink, he stares at his own.

Are his eyes really that unsettling?

There’s a feeling of recoil that settles on his abdomen. One he can’t tell the root of. It’s nothing he ever questioned until now. Until her. He steps off the sink, hitting his shoulder on the frame as he steps out, and heads for the door, a glance to the sword sitting next to the bed as per habit.

The night’s lukewarm humidity embraces him like a second skin, and now the feeling of it crawling amplifies twice when he notices Tifa leaning against the railing, not really looking over her shoulder despite hearing him. In blindness, she’d know his sound. The hesitance of it. Cloud steps closer and she doesn’t step back.

“Can’t sleep?” He tries, taking place next to her in the railing. Tifa’s expression is lost, chin up as if she’s searching for something. 

“Takes me a bit, usually,” though her voice is clear, it sounds tired. That’s what running a bar and hideout does to you, he supposes.

It ends there with a nod of his own, and removing his eyes from her to look at… whatever she searches for.

“It’s funny,” though lighthearted enough, there’s a small shake to her tone she tries to pass for a chuckle. Tifa finally looks at him, and he didn’t expect to be rendered speechless with just that simple gesture. “I have the habit of coming outside to look at the stars when... there are none.” His mouth opens like he’s going to speak, but it closes against him. She appreciates it, and continues, “Even if we were topside, it’s too polluted.”

He hums a sound of acknowledgement. “Some folks have never even seen ‘em.”

“No,” her first smile of the night. “Not the way we have.”

Cloud’s mind goes places. To Nibelheim, for one, but mostly to solutions. The things that matter to her feel like they should matter to him just as much, so he dabbles in whatever longing she feels. He thinks he could take her outside Midgar, someday. When he finds the words and money for it, that is.

He shrugs, “...you could make up your own, then.” 

And Tifa just looks at him like he’s speaking another language, which he very well is, a curiosity overtaking her. “Huh?”

“Over there,” a nod in front of them, to the space above the ground’s houses littered with lights; tall, nearly abandoned constructions flickering now and then. “I just… thought all those lights in the distance could make up for it. Maybe even make a constellation or two.”

Her eyes haven’t left him, and her lips are parted in what he assumes — hopes — is about to form a smile. To his relief, it’s a laugh that comes out of her.  _ So weird, Cloud,  _ she thinks, endeared,  _ you’re so weird.  _

“You’re right,” Tifa hums, and it’s enough to prompt a brief smile on him, pleased to hear her. She turns to watch the artificial lights for a moment, quiet, and then, “over there,” one of her eyes closes, and she points with her index, “I think that could be a bird, can you see it?”

He can’t, because he hasn’t stopped staring at her.

She can feel as much.

The yellow bulb over their heads casts more shadow than light, and Tifa gets the worst of it. If he couldn’t decipher people’s faces accurately as it is, she seems unrecognizable. The lightheartedness of the moment, while true and plenty in the moment, was something he didn’t realize he took for granted, short lived as it was to process properly. Cloud makes the mistake of searching her face when she finally turns to him, a different feel to the smile she wore.

And her eyes. 

He wonders if this is anything like the eeriness she felt when staring at his own.

* * *

The visions of her, the Tifa that stays in the mind’s eye of people, is an ocean wave that never quite forms. Enticing to look at. Something you could never grab fistfuls of without watching the water seep through your fingers. The sea takes so much space and hides twice the amount. The sea lets you know when it’s out for carnage. He would dip in it, if it meant getting a glimpse of what hides in there.

She can’t have that. Not until he’s bare first.

And even then, god knows what he’d be dipping into. That version of her is nothing but that. A version.

Oftentimes, Tifa hangs like the moon, black hair pouring all around her as the night, droplet earrings like her north star, and pinches the waves to her will. Draws a tide that washes the shore off threats, and pulls it back again for safekeeping. Goes back to folding inside herself. Cloud’s only ever looked up to the sky, the distance between him and her, the unreachable delight. One that hides a face, and is subject to the love notes of someone too caught by the initial shine.

He hadn’t been any different, once. 

Struck by the daze of the beauty and the care. When he realizes she’s not in a tight spot, but instead a well, one that deepens every time she pulls back, Cloud understands his own shortcomings. The realization he has not understood as well as he thought he did. That her good spirits hadn’t meant a high morale, rather, Tifa distrusted being vulnerable. Around him, and around anyone.

That her red eyes have been nothing if not a warning sign flickering.

* * *

There’s a premonition that has dragged her down since leaving sewers, one that Aerith tries to soothe. Tifa walks behind them, or much too ahead, despite his efforts to level the distance. He can see she’s trying not to think. He can see she’s paler by the second, her movements rooted in a haze.

When her suspicions are confirmed by the transmission, no one can keep up with her.

Her mortification heightens her fear. The kicks are merciless stomps, and the way she rips through with her knuckles makes for a dismemberment Cloud has only ever gotten glimpses of in the time he’s fought alongside her. He realizes Tifa isn’t above rage, has never been. A locked heart doesn’t just seal away how she can word her feelings. 

It seals the composure she’s tried to keep at bay.

* * *

When Tifa wakes up near sector seven’s wreckage, she wishes she could go back to closing her eyes.

Her hair, dirtied, skin crawling with a ghost sensation of the heat from the escape. She doesn’t want to stand up, because it means getting a better view. It means facing this aftermath she’s suffered before. When the first thing she sees is Cloud staring down at her, she closes her eyes.  _ Right, he’s here. _

It really is Nibelheim again.

When she opens her eyes again, they’re haunted.

Barret asks her to hold onto her anger, oblivious to the fact it’s all she’s ever done. It has kept her alive, and it has kept her simmering. The girl Zangan saved and doomed as the last of his lessons. Cloud notices she closes her fists when anger overwhelms her, and he recognizes the way her lids fall just so. Tifa doesn’t look at Barret in the eye, and the man understands. He pulls her close, and doesn’t ask her to. 

She’s in no position to give. Not now.

The image of her bar burning sticks on the gloss of her iris. With the way her blood boils, she thinks she can handle the flames, and steps forward, disbelieving this is what it came to. The force that pulls her back is unmistakable, Cloud’s, the anchor he has  _ learned _ to become, but she can barely feel him.

Thoroughly overwhelmed, she can’t feel herself.

* * *

It turns out that night it doesn’t _take her a bit_ to sleep, because she can’t sleep at all.

She nearly stumbled as she went down the stairs, Elmyra’s framed pictures and dusty trinkets scrutinizing her escape. This time, standing on top the hill, the earth shakes with her, the water is disturbed. The night is in her, wordless until he stops pressing his ear against his door and follows her.

Tifa tells him they took everything again, but she’s lost more than he has this time. He can’t quite decipher what her voice holds, if it’s this or that amount of sadness, or regret. Despite her best efforts, nothing ends up right. Nothing works. She hasn’t healed. He doesn’t understand the beginning of it. The rim of her eyes betrays her, lets go of the tide of tears she tried so hard to safekeep, and the anger that peaks like a wave. It’s a reservoir that simmers. He’s caught in the flood of it, struggling to keep up with the hurt that swirls him around. 

Whoever said water can only ever seep through your fingers lied. Cloud hugged her just fine.

* * *

Inside the room she was assigned, Tifa glances at her gloves sitting on her nightstand, and then at the skin of her knuckles. She never noticed how hard her blows were until he runs a finger on them, kneeling in front of her as she sat on the bed. A soft sound of discomfort leaves her, and he stops his examination of the darkening purple and blue. 

“...it’s fine,” of course, she reassures him. Her hands are balled into fists. Like they are holding onto something. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to wake up Elmyra because of it.” 

She thinks his eyes are glowing. A luminescence that she’s used to by now, because she’s the only one who gets to see it. He purses his lips slightly, and stands up to sit next to her. Tifa watches him with care, her hands relaxing onto her lap.

Cloud can’t find the words to suggest he stays the night here. But he doesn’t need to.

Her back is pressed against the wall, a small space under the window, and he considers sliding to the floor and sleeping with only the bedside to support him. Cloud is trying not to think when he lays down instead, turned on his side, because that’s the only way they could fit. It feels like the intimacy should be doing something more than easing him, to his surprise. Or maybe it’s the strain of the day taking a toll on him. Or maybe it’s her natural lulling.

Tifa, on the other hand, is as still as if she were dead. He can see, despite the near extinct light by now, the tenseness of her eyes can be nothing if not the product of images replaying on them, thinly veiled by her lashes. In the dark, she thinks of the people who don’t get to sleep in beds tonight. How there’s never an answer, and the right thing isn’t as clear cut as it seems.

“Tifa,” he whispers, and she looks up, slowly. His hand, gloveless, reaches to place itself on the back of her head. Pull her close to his chest. “...we’ll start again.” And when they do, he’ll take her somewhere else.

She can’t tell if it’s detachment or empathy that prompts him to say as much, but if nothing else, then it’s care. Her face hides on his neck, hands pressing on his rib cage, feeling only the aftershocks of his speeding heart. 

“I hope so, Cloud.” she murmurs back, pretending it’s sleep what overcame her.

When she finds the snakes, she would rip them apart.

**Author's Note:**

> ...anyway, tifa has lots of things to be angry about and i'm not about to deny women of rage. ty for reading!


End file.
